The following is a conversation with Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer at the Human

Rights Foundation and the Oslo Freedom Forum.

In recent times, Alex has focused on how cryptocurrency, and especially Bitcoin, can be a tool for

empowering democracy and civil liberties in the world, most crucially, parts of the world

that are living under authoritarian regimes.

As a side note, let me say that I have been learning a lot about the ways in which money

can be used to amass power, and in the same way, the decentralization of money can be

used to resist the corrupting nature of this power.

Alex and I do not agree on everything, but we strive for the same betterment of humanity.

He is sensitive to the suffering in the world, and is dedicating his life to finding solutions

that lessen that suffering.

Whether Bitcoin is one such solution, I don't know, but I think it has a chance, and that

means it is worth exploring deeply.

I'm staying in this path of learning, patiently, and with as little ego as possible, I hope

you come along with me on this journey as well.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

We recorded this conversation a while ago, and I thought I lost the audio, and was really

disappointed with myself for messing this thing up, but luckily, last week, I found

it, and so, rescued from out of the abyss of nonexistence, here's my conversation with

Alex Glastain.

What are some universal human rights that you believe all people should have?

So free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of belief, freedom to participate in your

government, the freedom to have privacy, the freedom to own things, property rights, these

are all basic, fundamental, negative rights, what we call them.

These are the basic, fundamental human freedoms.

What does negative rights mean?

Negative rights are liberties, and positive rights are entitlements.

So after World War II, when the UN came together, it was largely a compromise between the communist

Soviet Union and the, you know, free United States, right?

So the US had, on its side of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, a bunch of liberties, essentially,

things like free speech, freedom of association, freedom of assembly.

The Soviets wanted entitlements, like the right to work, the right to have housing,

the right to water, the right to a vacation.

So if you actually read the UN Declaration for Human Rights, it's a negotiation between

the Soviets and the Americans.

Later, there was another document in the 70s released called the International Covenant

on Civil and Political Rights.

And this is what HRF uses as its sort of like lodestar, its founding document.

And this is like, essentially, an international agreement on the negative rights.

Those are the things we choose to focus on, because essentially, authoritarian regimes

can commit fraud and claim they're giving the positive rights, the entitlements, without

having any of the negative liberties.

And they can do that because they don't have any like free speech or press freedom.

When you take people's basic fundamental freedoms away, it's quite easy to make like a Potemkin

village and pretend that there's the entitlements and that we have good health care and, you

know, it's the same sort of thing that authoritarians have done for decades, Cuba and Venezuela

and the Soviet Union.

Peter Bell.

Do you think it's possible for authoritarian regimes to manipulate, to kind of lie about

the negative rights as well, by saying that the people have free speech, the people have

the freedom for assembly and all those kinds of things, can't you still manipulate the

idea that citizenry still has those rights?

The opposition leader of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, he once told me the funny joke that, you know,

in my country, we have freedom of speech, we don't have freedom after speech.

So yeah, they can absolutely manipulate whatever they want.

But I've done research into socioeconomic data.

And I guess what I'm telling you is that authoritarian regimes, which make up 53% of the world's

population across 95 countries, about 4.3 billion people, those who live under those

regimes are subject to massive fraud when it comes to things like literacy rates, life

expectancy, any sort of socioeconomic data, economic growth.

They can do this because there's no free press.

So for us at the Human Rights Foundation, and for people like me, we believe that the

negative rights, the liberties, the things that are in, for example, the Bill of Rights

in the US Constitution, these things are the table and then we can build on top of that.

We can build the rest of our societies on top of that.

The freest countries in the world have both the negative liberties and the entitlements

like Norway, for example, but there's a big difference between Norway and North Korea.

In North Korea, they only claim to have the entitlements and they definitely don't have

the liberties.

Do you think there's one right that's more important than others?

You kind of suggested the freedom of the press, maybe freedom of speech, that if you take

that away, all the other ones kind of collapse along with like from a ripple effect.

Is there something fundamental that you like to focus your attention on to defend, to protect,

to make sure it's there?

Yeah, I think free speech is probably the most fundamental.

It's probably why the founders chose to make it into the First Amendment.

A lot of things are downstream from there.

Property rights are also very, very important.

Obviously we've seen the toll of violent redistributionism, you know, in over the last hundred years,

whether it was Lenin or Stalin or Mao or other regimes and everywhere from Ethiopia to colonialists

everywhere to North Korea, it's not a pretty legacy.

Is free speech clear to you as a concept?

There's been quite a few debates, especially in the digital age, what it means to violate

freedom of speech.

There's been a lot of new, like novel mechanisms for people to communicate with each other,

like especially on social networks.

And it seems that unclear because a lot of times those are managed by private companies.

It's unclear how much protection do the citizens have to have when they're communicating.

A lot of people are being censored on these social platforms.

Some people, even presidents get removed from those social platforms.

Have you thought about the freedom of speech in the United States, but in the world?

As it's implemented in the 21st century, given the internet and all those kinds of things?

There is a Soviet dissident named Natan Sharansky who survived the regime and he wrote a book

in which his thesis was essentially the way that you can define a free society is through

something called the town square test.

Can you go to a public space where you live and criticize your ruler loudly without fear

of retribution?

If you can do that, you have free speech.

I think that's a pretty good litmus test.

Most people in this world cannot do that.

If you live in Havana, if you live in Moscow, if you live in Beijing, you cannot do that.

And that's not a free society.

In Austin, Texas, in Boston, Massachusetts, in London, in Santiago, Chile, in Tokyo, Japan,

in many democracies, you can do that.

And I think that that's a really helpful basic sort of litmus test.

Does the content of the criticism matter?

Can it be complete lies, meaning conspiracy theories that involve claiming that the leader

is, let's say, a lizard slash pedophile slash, you know, I'm not saying that those are lies,

look into it, but they're very unlikely phenomena.

So like, does that matter?

I think it ends poorly when the state tries to restrict speech.

I think that's kind of how I would define censorship.

I think censorship and deplatforming are two different things.

Private companies, you know, they get to make up their own rules about what's allowed on

their platforms.

And I think that's very different from a government with guns and an army restricting the speech

of its citizens with threats of violence.

These things are different for me.

That violence is a fundamental difference.

I don't know, I've gotten the chance to have dinner with Alex Jones and I've talked to

him a few times offline and it does, I understand why people are so off put by him, but it does

bother me that he's universally removed from every platform.

It feels like there's many more evil people, bad people compared to Alex Jones who still

are given a voice on these platforms.

And so I'm uncomfortable with the universality of the application of the censorship by these

platforms.

But on the flip side, you're right.

There's not a violence, there's not tanks, there's not guns behind that censorship.

Yeah.

It's a bit of a generalization, but Alex Jones would be in prison or dead if he were in North

Korea or in Cuba or in Russia or in China, that the authorities would not tolerate him

to do what he did.

And here he can kind of do what he wants.

He's encountering some resistance in the marketplace of ideas, large organizations, corporations,

and a lot of public sentiment in different parts of our country don't like him.

They're doing their best to drown out his voice, but that's very different from a violent

threat of censorship from the state.

And that's what we study.

That's what I study are these, you know, what is the state doing?

That's kind of paramount for me.

Yeah.

And that's true because in the marketplace of ideas, there could be a company that springs

up that gives Alex Jones a platform and the United States is not going to prevent those

companies from functioning.

Of course, there's from a technology perspective, there is AWS removing Parler from the platform

and gets a little weird, you know, as you get closer and closer to the computer infrastructure,

because then you get closer and closer to the state, actually, the more you get to the

infrastructure that's usually managed by the state, the closer it gets to then the control

of the state.

I would argue AWS is pretty damn close to infrastructure that's kind of controlled

by the state.

If you especially look at other nations, China, Russia, there's, I don't know who runs the

computer infrastructure for Russia and China, but I bet the state has complete oversight

over that.

And so that level of computer infrastructure, having control about which social networks

can and cannot operate is very uncomfortable to me.

But you're right, I think it's good to focus on the obvious violations of these principles

as opposed to the gray areas.

Of course, the gray areas are fascinating.

You mentioned HRF, Human Rights Foundation.

What is it?

What is its mission?

Yes, I've been working for HRF since 2007.

We are a charity, a nonprofit, a 501c3 based in New York, and our mission is to promote

and protect individual rights and freedoms in authoritarian societies around the world.

So again, we define about 95 countries as authoritarian, meaning it's either a one party

state or opposition politicians are outlawed or persecuted, there's no real free speech,

there's no press freedom, there's no independent judiciary, there really aren't checks and

balances and even trying to create like a human rights organization or like an environmental

group would be illegal.

And the majority of the world's population lives in that environment.

That's very important.

You said 53%.

53%, 4.3 billion people.

And I saw you outlined a lot of different sources of suffering in the world.

And then you sort of put people living under authoritarian governments as like more than

all of them.

I forget all the examples you provided, but then...

Sure.

I mean, it's...

Yeah, maybe you can mention if you remember.

The number of people who are refugees, the number of people who suffer from natural disasters,

the number of people who live under abject poverty, the number of people who don't have

access to clean drinking water, all of these are dwarfed by the number of people who live

under authoritarianism.

And yet it's not something that we talk about a lot because people are mercantilist and

the powers that be are happy to sacrifice freedoms and privacy for money.

We live in a profit seeking world.

To get evidence of this, take a look at the list of sponsors of the upcoming Olympics

in China where the CCP is currently committing genocide against the weaker population or

look at the number of people and the famous investors who went to Saudi Arabia a couple

months ago for the Davos in the desert.

I mean, Ray Dalio was there, all kinds of people were there, or at least they were invited

and they said they were gonna go.

And this is a government that at the time was torturing a female activist who just wanted

to drive a car.

This is a government that had murdered Jamal Khashoggi in a brutal fashion just a couple

years earlier.

So, I mean, at the end of the day when it comes down to brass tacks, I mean, the powers

that be, even the free countries are led by people who are very, very happy to sacrifice

all these pretty words about human rights when it comes down to profits, unfortunately.

So, do you think capitalism, that's maybe one of the flaws of capitalism is it turns

a blind eye to injustices against human nature, against the human rights, like it turns a

blind eye to authoritarian governments?

Look, I think that at the end of the day, like free trade is actually really good.

And you can just look at France and Germany as an example of how like a capitalist structure

would develop.

If you have two capitalist actors, they're very unlikely to fight each other.

There's very unlikely to be violence, right?

These are two countries which basically murdered some large percentage of each other's male

population three times in a hundred years in three different wars, right?

And now today, war is like unthinkable and a lot of that is because of increased collaboration,

increased trade.

So, when you have two capitalist actors, they act in a very productive way with each other.

But as soon as you introduce an authoritarian actor, all bets are off.

So, I think what you have is a conflict between capitalist actors and authoritarian actors.

And at the end of the day, people need to, yes, have more than just capitalist intentions

in the geopolitical level I'm talking about, they need to actually take a stand for principles.

Otherwise, you have athletes and businesses and governments that are all too happy to

do business with the Chinese Communist Party, for example, right now.

I think that there is a little more than just kind of the pure profit, yes.

You mentioned what are the signs that the state is an authoritarian state.

How do you know if you're living in an authoritarian state or when you study another nation and

analyze the behavior of another nation, how do you know that's an authoritarian state?

Is it as simple as them having a dictator?

Is it as simple as them as declaring that they don't have a democracy or is there something

more subtle?

There's a couple of good litmus tests.

One is actually, can you have a gay pride parade?

It actually lines up perfectly, it doesn't matter what religion the dictatorship is.

They don't like minorities and they love to scapegoat, whether it's gays or religious

minorities, etc.

So it lines up pretty well.

That's really interesting.

If you cannot have a gay pride parade in your country, because you're fearful that you're

going to get the crap kicked out of you, probably live in an authoritarian regime.

I'm sure that's not just about some kind of homophobia.

Why is that?

That's really interesting.

Because that's right.

I'm going through...

Fascism scapegoats minorities.

There's an other, you create an other group and then you...

Yeah, I mean Uganda is a great example of this, but so is Saudi Arabia, so is China.

I mean, so is Cuba.

I mean, these are all regimes which demonize the LGBT communities.

It's interesting because maybe you can correct me, but from my very distant outside of perspective,

the sort of the way that certain authoritarian governments speak about gay people is it's

almost like, what is it?

We don't have gay people in our country kind of idea as opposed to scapegoating, which

is like...

Total denial is the most powerful form of demonization.

I mean, this is what the Iranian dictatorship does.

A few years ago when Ahmadinejad, who was then sort of the de facto leader, he came

to Columbia University and he tried to give a speech, which you can look up and he tried

to claim that there were no gays in Iran.

And that's the most powerful form of demonization is trying to just wipe out your utter existence.

There's other good litmus tests too.

For example, you can think about comedy.

Can you make money making fun of your government on television?

If you cannot, you live in a dictatorship most likely.

I mean, it's shocking to people that I work with who live in dictatorships when I tell

them that not only are comedians able to safely make fun of our government, but they get paid

very well to do so.

That's a hallmark of our free society.

That's another good litmus test.

Hear that Tim Dylan, you should go to North Korea, check it out.

Yeah.

And look, there are tons of flaws with democracies.

This is a really good test by the way.

The United States is a deeply flawed country in many ways.

Our prison system is a disaster.

There's a horrible war on drugs.

We committed a grievous crime in my opinion by invading Iraq.

We did a lot of problematic things, but our core architecture is still an open society.

The people who criticize the US the most usually live within it.

And if they were to move to a different country and try to use that criticism against their

new rulers, they wouldn't fare so well.

So whether it's Chomsky or whomever, if they were to go to Cuba and live in Cuba and try

to criticize Cuba like they do America, it wouldn't last very long.

So I think what's important to distinguish between open societies and closed ones or

like free societies and authoritarian regimes, it doesn't mean that your government's going

to be good all the time.

What it means is that the citizens have a way to push for reform, have a way to hold

the rulers accountable.

So even if you don't like what the US government does, whether it was under Biden or Trump

or Obama or Bush, we can rotate them through voting.

And we have an independent Supreme Court that rotates over time.

And we have people that we can elect directly to serve our interests.

And then there's like a free press and there's lobbyists and all kinds of people that jostle

for power.

So there's a separation of powers.

And I like to think about a free society really as like at the bottom of the foundation of

the pyramid really would be free speech.

And then you would have civil society, like for example, human rights organizations, environmental

groups, stamp collectors, athletes, any groups that come together beyond the government's

sort of strict instruction.

And then on top of that, at the third level, you have separation of powers, again, what

I'm describing.

So authoritarian regimes don't really have any of these layers to them.

And then at the top, then you put elections, but the elections are meaningless if you don't

have the foundation below.

Every dictator gets elected.

Kim Jong Un gets elected.

He's the only person on the ballot.

Every dictator from Hitler to Chavez, they all got elected.

Elections on their own mean literally nothing.

You have to have these other layers beneath to actually be an open and free society.

I think it's very important for people to understand.

Although Hitler in an interesting way, at a certain point just said, I'm going to be

a ruler forever, which is interesting.

There's an important switch that happens when you, as opposed to having a facade of elections,

you just put that aside and saying basically like, we're not even doing this.

Yeah.

There's like a ladder that you climb the election and you pull the ladder up and then no one

else can climb up.

This sadly happened in Egypt and it was quite predictable.

After Mubarak was ousted after the Arab Spring, Morsi came in and it looked like the Muslim

Brotherhood was not really going to be very democratic.

But it didn't really matter because then the military came back and now we have Sisi who's

even worse than Mubarak.

So a lot of times in these regimes, unfortunately, it's very difficult for people to build that

democratic society afterwards.

Some people have told me that when you live in a totalitarian or authoritarian regime,

it's kind of like a political desert.

What grows in the desert?

Scorpions and cacti, right?

So basically people with very extreme views because you as an authoritarian ruler, your

best method for control is to get rid of the moderates.

You have to crush the moderates.

That's very important.

You want to have the only opposition to you be extremists.

That way when you go and have negotiations with the United States, you can kind of hold

up the terrorists or whomever, the extremists and say, it's either us or them, right?

And then the realists who run the US government are going to choose you.

And that's why, one of the reasons why the US government has supported so many dictators

around the world over the last few decades.

Do you think authoritarian systems emerge naturally, like that's the natural state of

things.

If you incorporate what human nature is, is there always going to be corrupt people the

rise to the top?

And we almost have to construct systems that protect us against ourselves kind of thing.

Another way to ask that is what kind of systems protect us from our own human nature?

We started with authoritarianism or autocracy, right?

Ruled by one or a small group oligarchy, and all humans lived under this structure for,

you know, the virtual, you know, bulk of all human existence.

Only until pretty recently did we start having actual democracy.

The idea that we should be ruled by rules, not by rulers, very powerful.

Invented in many places across the world.

Western Africa had this idea and so did the ancient Greeks.

And they started to implement it.

Although as most know, we didn't have full democracy for a long, long time because it

was only property owners or only men, only people of a certain race.

But this idea that we can like rotate our rulers and that we could be ruled by rules

is extremely powerful and it really like for me, the ideas behind this, I think unlocked

a lot of the industrial revolution, these small personal freedoms that were allowed

in some countries, but not others.

And they unlocked a lot of the scientific innovation over the last few hundred years.

And to me, there's like a really straight line between like scientific inquiry, free

speech, freedoms, and then more prosperity and more effectiveness as a civilization.

So I think that democracy, you know, ruled by the people is definitely an upgrade from

autocracy or oligarchy, you know, which would be ruled by one or ruled by a small group.

And I think that the democratic revolution has been an incredible thing for our world.

And it's, you know, you can do half class full, half class empty.

The half class full is that almost half the world lives under democracy.

Like that's an incredible achievement.

But just under half.

Yeah.

Just under half.

So.

But that's billions of people.

It's billions of people.

And if you look at the progress of things, it's getting better and better and better.

I mean, if you, you know.

Yeah.

We're a little bit of a stalemate here.

Democracy's really blossomed between World War II and the year 2000, especially in the

eighties and nineties, you had an incredible wave of fall, you know, where many, many authoritarian

regimes fell and were replaced by democracies.

I think around 2015, the acceleration kind of came to a standstill a little bit.

There's some good news in some countries and there's bad news in others.

Like in the last 10 years, you've had, for example, the Philippines has gone backwards.

Thailand has gone backwards.

Bangladesh has gone backwards.

Turkey has gone backwards.

That's like a half billion people right there.

So you've had some positives, like, you know, there was positive movement forward in Armenia,

Malaysia, some other countries, but we're kind of at a stalemate right now.

And what most people fear about where we are right now, who I respect, is what is the digital

transformation of the world due to this like progress of democracy or of open societies.

And that's what concerns me the most.

Oh, interesting.

So I've, and we'll talk about one of the most fascinating technologies, which is Bitcoin,

how it can help.

But I have a sense that technology, like most technological innovations will give power

to the individuals, will fight authoritarian governments as opposed to give more power

to authoritarian governments.

But your sense is there's ways to give for technology to be utilized as a tool for the

abuse of the citizenry.

I've seen both.

In my work at Ahrefs, I started by helping to put together backpacks with foreign information

that we sent to the Cuban underground library movement.

So in Cuba, you know, to own a book at the time, you had to have the government's permission.

There's very little internet penetration.

Okay.

So we would send in movies, you know, V for Vendetta, dubbed into Spanish, and people

would sit inside their homes and they'd watch it and they would answer questions with each

other.

It was awful.

And then after that, I worked with people inside North Korea.

We would send in flash drives.

We have this program called Flash Drives for Freedom.

We've sent over 100,000 flash drives in our work into North Korea, a country of about

25 million people.

That's a lot.

It's a big, big difference.

That's, you know, many, many millions of hours of films, books, movies, etc.

So I've seen the power that technology can have where, you know, in the 60s and 70s,

you know, to get to break an information blockade, you had to like send in crates of books into

a communist country.

So now all of a sudden, you can send the entire contents of what was once the Library of Alexandria

on something the size of your thumbnail, like that's remarkable.

So obviously, I've seen the positives of technology and we'll certainly get into Bitcoin.

But I'm, you know, very concerned about essentially big data analysis, like what people call AI

or general, you know, specific kinds of AI, like very concerning.

I think these are very authoritarian.

I mean, it's very hard to make a case that AI is going to be good for human rights.

Very difficult, in my opinion.

It may be good for health.

It may be good for our efforts to protect the planet.

It may be good for a lot of scientific things.

I find it very hard to believe it'll be good for civil liberties.

Oh, that's fun.

This is fun because I disagree.

Give me your examples.

I'm serious.

What AI applications will improve civil liberties?

I thought you meant examples of stuff that's already out there, because I can give you

examples that, for example, the kind of things I would like to work on, but also the kind

of things I'm hoping to see, which is AI could be used by centralized powers, by governments,

by big organizations like Facebook and Twitter and so on to collect data about people.

Right.

Right.

I believe there's a huge hunger among people to have control over their own data.

So instead you can have AI that's distributed or people have complete ownership of their

little AI systems.

So like the kind of stuff that I would like to build or like to see it to be built is

you could think of it as personal assistance or AI that's owned by you and you get to give

it out.

You have complete control over all of your data.

You have complete control over everything that's learnable about your day to day experiences

that could be useful in the market of goods and ideas and all those kinds of things.

So it has to do with, so I know you talk about the surveillance, which is very interesting.

It's who gets to have control of the data.

And I think, I believe there's a lot of hunger in among regular people to have control over

their data such that if you want to create a business, you have a lot of money to be

made from a capitalist perspective by providing products that let people control their data

where you have no control.

Sounds like to me you're describing encryption or at least the ability to encrypt, the ability

to use digital keys to secure your property.

And that to me is a very powerful force for individual rights, very powerful.

And it's what animates Bitcoin ultimately, which we'll get into.

But for me, at least the way I look at it today in 2021, the threat from big data analysis

used by governments and authoritarian regimes is terrifying.

I mean, to actually see what the Chinese Communist Party is doing where they have hundreds of

millions of cameras overseeing society, cameras that can tell who's a Uyghur and who's a

Ham, that to me is terrifying and everything is sorted instantly.

There are supercomputers that are built in Urumqi, in Xinjiang for this explicit purpose.

And it allows the government to quickly sort and basically commit genocide a lot faster

and it's really scary.

So I do agree and I've seen personally how powerful technology can be as a force for

freedom, but I'm very, very worried about big data analysis in the hands of governments.

See, that's funny because I tend to see governments as ultimately incompetent in the space of

technology to where there will always be lagging behind.

So you look at what the Chinese surveillance systems are doing, I believe once it starts

getting bad enough that technologies would be created to resist that.

So to mess with it from the hacker community, but also from the individual community.

So surveillance is actually very difficult from a centralized perspective to collect

data about you, to detect everything you are because you can spoof a lot of that information.

So I believe you can put power in the hands of the citizens to sort of feed the government

fake data to confuse it at a mass scale to where it'll make their surveillance less effective.

That could be very sort of hopeful.

Yeah.

I mean, the practical application in Xinjiang, which is a territory the size of Alaska, where

a large percentage of the population has been put into prison camps.

The current issue of the New Yorker has an absolutely harrowing essay that tells the

story of one such woman who in, I believe, 2017 got sucked into one of these camps and

it took her a year or more to get out.

And she's talking about how in each home in Xinjiang, each home has a QR code on it that

the police can scan and get like a quick instant download of who lives there.

Each car has, you know, like a scannable code.

Every single person has their DNA taken and the DNA is being sifted through and analyzed

by algorithms.

So this is like the Chinese government's laboratory for how can we use technology to oppress.

It's like sort of like digital Leninism.

And that to me is one of the biggest risks in our world today and it's not talked about

enough.

That's interesting.

So technology is basically enables the automation of oppression.

Absolutely.

So like...

But to define technology, big data analysis and, you know, maybe specific AI, etc. does,

but encryption allows us to fight back.

It's very important people understand we have tools to fight back.

The, you know, big brother can only grow if it can feed on your data.

If it can't get your data, it can't grow.

So you have to willingly give up stuff to the cloud for this monster to grow.

We can like make the monster hungry and shrink it if we give it less data.

And I think that's where I would agree with you in terms of like wanting to empower people

to be able to do stuff on their own terms in a sovereign way.

And yeah, maybe you're kind of thinking like the personal assistant who helps out Tony

Stark or something like that.

And that's, yeah, as long as there's no back doors and that's a sovereign thing that you've

popped up and created and you have the keys to, absolutely.

But practically speaking, if we're talking about the world today as is, we need to be

concerned about the way that authoritarian regimes are using big data analysis and they're

going to buy this software and this equipment from the Chinese government, they're already

doing it.

State level surveillance has already been purchased by governments everywhere from Latin

America to Sub Saharan Africa to the heart of Europe.

There's been huge scandals in Britain over their purchase of Chinese surveillance technology.

Part of the Chinese government's Belt and Road campaign, which is basically to build

the infrastructure of this century and to be in control of it, part of that idea is

to ship out and install surveillance technology both at the telecom level and at the surveillance

level across dozens of countries around the world and have that back door.

There's this national security law in China, which states that companies that are Chinese,

which are abroad, are mandated to send data back to Beijing.

So they are building this huge global surveillance state.

And again, not talked about enough, you should go Google and research the Belt and Road.

I think it's very important that we confront this.

Yeah, I'm really glad you're talking about it because it's probably important to understand.

I'm also hopeful that as people get educated about how much their data, when collected,

unencrypted, but in general, can be used to harm them.

I mean, it's almost like an education.

I feel like if you know, it's a double edged sword because I feel like people become fearful

too easily and that actually has a very negative effect on the quality of life.

In some sense, you want to have tools that allow you to live freely as opposed to live

in fear.

If you live in fear, it's not a good way to live.

So it's a balance.

It's a free society versus a fear society.

Yeah, fear society.

And look, people are, it's all about the trade offs you make in your daily life.

Like living more privately with more freedom is less convenient.

You trade freedom and privacy for convenience and comfort and speed.

Absolutely.

And the engineering decision and everything that you do.

In the West, in advanced democracies, we have not necessarily personally seen the results

of that trade off because we live in these free societies that have these checks and

balances and freedoms.

But as soon as you step into an authoritarian state and you make those trade offs, your

life immediately becomes more restrictive.

And what people are worried about is that even in advanced economies, market democracies,

etc., people are worried that they might not survive the great social digital transformation.

You know, look at what the NSA is capable of doing.

I mean, for now, it's not that big of a problem because we still have free speech.

But it's deeply concerning what Snowden revealed.

And it's a nice reminder that we need to be focused on privacy and encryption and on helping

users become more sovereign regardless of where you live.

It's kind of like a crutch to live in a free society.

Like, you know, it's almost like a free lunch in a way.

You're not going to be sent to a prison camp because of the color of your skin or your

beliefs or what you say about the government.

And you're very lucky.

Again, most people do live in a society where you can be persecuted for those things.

And I feel like, especially in America, we forget that we're distanced from that really

strong reality, you know.

On the topic of Snowden and the NSA, what should we be thinking about?

Because that feels like already an outdated set of conversations because of the information

we've gotten from the past.

It feels like everything's gotten quiet now in terms of how much we actually know about

the...

No, it's hugely important.

I think the two lessons from Snowden are, A, the Patriot Act and the War on Terror and

mass surveillance are not necessary for our democracy and for our freedoms.

This was a false choice.

We never had to sacrifice them to be safer.

And we've seen that.

The government has spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on these like surveillance

programs that you can read about have amounted to very little, except for tremendous bureaucratic

waste and, you know, erosion of our freedoms.

But at the same time, we need to practice more privacy.

And the dramatic increase in the usage of Signal, for example, has been really, really

great to see.

It's fantastic that tens of millions of people are downloading Signal and using it.

You should try to be onboarding more and more of your conversations onto Signal, for example,

where governments can't see what you're saying.

Maybe they can see the metadata.

Maybe they can see that you sent your phone number, sent a message to someone else's phone

number at this time, but they can't see what's inside.

So using encryption in your life is very, very important.

That's a good starting point.

I would say that's kind of step A.

The ideas of democracy, the ideas of the balance of power, all the ideas that we were talking

about, the constructs, were inventions.

I wonder if there's other inventions that will allow us to sort of not engage, not give

governments or any centralized institutions so much power.

Why do citizens have to use Signal?

Because it's an effort.

You have to understand exactly why.

So that's a nice little solution for a particular set of problems.

But there's a million other ways that data, I'm sure, is being collected constantly.

If we don't create a system that prevents the establishment of these centralized powers,

then we'll always have this problem.

Yeah, I think we can keep it simple for the purposes of this conversation.

You have politics, information, and money.

Those are the three things I would encourage us to focus on.

In politics, yes, someone invented democracy.

I mean, whether it was the Greeks, the West Africans, or many others around the world

around the same time invented this idea that we should be ruled by rules and not by rulers.

And that has evolved dramatically.

And then you have information.

Information also used to be highly centralized, right?

Think about how rich you had to be to gain access to a library before the printing press,

or how much money you had to have, or how close to the king or the feudal lord you had

to be to be able to have that ability.

But now, the majority of the world, billions of people have access to all information in

their pocket, and they can set up an account on social media and get their word out.

So not only politics, but information has been dramatically decentralized.

And I would say that encrypted messaging is kind of a corollary to that second innovation

in as much as now people are like more effortlessly, like Signal is a lot easier to use than PGP,

for example.

They're more easily able to practice privacy when it comes to having private messages globally.

These are all good things and we need to keep pushing.

And I think money is like, honestly, maybe the most important piece.

And that's why I spent so much time thinking about Bitcoin.

Okay, so politics, information, money, yes, let's talk about money.

What is money?

Why is it important to think about in the context of human rights?

I have witnessed money be peripheralized, it has taken a backseat in the human rights

conversation.

The idea of currency, who makes the money, who makes the rules, who issues it, who sets

the interest rates, all these things, it is not on the menu of human rights activists.

If you just do like a systematic study of like the human rights discourse over the last

several decades, money is not there.

It's also not really taught in schools.

Like children don't really learn about money, where does it come from?

It's kind of hidden from a lot of our discourse.

Only really when I got into Bitcoin did I started learning more about money.

I spent 10 years at the Human Rights Foundation and we did all kinds of programs around the

world.

We convened Oslo Freedom Forums in different places and I got to meet hundreds of dissidents.

And very rarely did they ever speak about currency or bank accounts or moving money

from one place to another.

But when I started asking them, they always had amazing stories about money, always.

I mean, my friend, Ivan Mawire, who started the This Flag movement in Zimbabwe, which

ended up toppling Robert Mugabe, when I asked him to come to San Francisco to give a talk

about hyperinflation, which he lived through.

He said, no one's ever asked me to do that before, but I'll come.

And he came, this was about three years ago.

And the first thing he did when he got on the stage is he opened up a shirt and he brought

out a necklace that had the 1980 Zimbabwean dollar on it.

And he said, we in the activist community wear this as a symbol of where our country

used to be because the Zimbabwean dollar used to be worth two British pounds.

And then of course, over the next two and a half decades of economic mismanagement and

corruption by Mugabe, it got inflated out of existence, right?

You've seen those like a hundred trillion dollars in Zimbabwean notes.

So he had to live through that, which was terrible and crushing, but he is an expert

on money.

If you actually talk to human rights activists about money, they know a lot about money.

They're just not usually asked to talk about it.

So for me, when I study money or look at money, it's really about control, who's creating

it, and how much does the population know about the creation of that money.

And when it comes to Bitcoin, it's really the people's money.

Like there is no shadowy force in charge of it.

We all know the rules.

We all know how it's going to get minted and how it's going to get printed.

And you know, that information is out there for everybody to see.

And there's no like special group of rules for one group of people or another group.

You know, a billionaire and a refugee are the same in the eyes of the protocol.

This is a rather revolutionary concept.

And in the same way that democracy allowed us to decentralize politics and have checks

and balances.

And in the same way that the internet is this culmination of technologies that allowed us

to decentralize information, access to and control over it, Bitcoin, you know, decentralizes

money.

I mean, no longer, again, is there one group of people who can just change it arbitrarily.

We're all in the same playing field.

And I think that that is a tremendous innovation.

You know, from one perspective, money and inflation, hyperinflation is a kind of symptom

of corruption, as opposed to the core of the corruption.

And at the flip side, in terms of resisting the corruption, resisting the abuse of human

rights, it's interesting to think that fighting inflation or fighting the mismanagement of

the money supply is a way to fight back authoritarianism or to fight authoritarianism.

And that's an interesting concept that I think was introduced to me by just plugging myself

intellectually into the Bitcoin community, but also just cryptocurrency in general, is

to like, it's not that money is a symptom.

You know, money is a tool to fight back, too.

Absolutely.

So in what way can Bitcoin be used to fight authoritarianism, not just in the United States,

but all of those 53% that you're referring to, how can Bitcoin help?

So we talked about authoritarianism, and we talked about the surveillance state.

To me, Bitcoin has two kind of key mechanisms through which it can help us.

Number one, it's a sovereign savings account.

It's debasement proof, meaning the government cannot print more whenever they want.

This is very, very different from fiat currency, which by its very name, its very nature can

be issued on sort of demand, right, by the rulers.

And while I live in a country where the rulers do a reasonable job managing the money, most

people aren't so lucky.

So only 13% of humans in the world live in a country that's a liberal democracy with

property rights and has what we call a reserve currency, meaning a currency so stable and

desirable that other countries save in it at the central bank level, right?

You basically have the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Switzerland, the Euro, and Canada.

I mean, those are like reserve currencies.

And these are liberal democracies where people have reasonable guarantees over property rights.

Everybody else either lives under like a weaker currency or an authoritarian regime.

That's 87% of the world's population, almost 7 billion people.

So for them, a sovereign savings account that's permissionless, meaning you don't have to

have ID to use it, is a big, big deal.

And a lot of people talk about Zimbabwe or Venezuela as some like isolated cases.

Oh, well, you know, hyperinflation only happens in those two countries.

I actually did some research into this and there's about one point, over, you know, close

to 1.3 billion people who live under double or triple digit inflation.

This is not an isolated instance.

We're talking huge countries, Nigeria, 200 million people, 15% inflation, Turkey, 15%

inflation for 100 million people, Argentina, 40% inflation for a country of 45 million

people.

So you can go down the list, there's about 35 countries where like people's earnings,

their wages are literally disappearing in front of their eyes over a matter of weeks

or months against things like the dollar or gold or real estate, right?

So this is a huge issue.

It absolutely is a human rights issue for me.

I mean, when it comes to your time and energy, having control over that or having it stolen

from you, I think this is pretty clear.

And Bitcoin is like an immediate, low cost, easily accessible solution for people.

And I've learned this not from my own assumptions, but by talking to people, by interviewing

dozens of people, whether it's in Sudan, which currently has triple digit inflation, or people

who've escaped from Syria, who have used Bitcoin to get their wealth out of the country, and

then also to make payments back to people inside, or Venezuela or elsewhere.

It's very, very powerful.

I think some very small percentage of people who have used, have owned Bitcoin was something

like 1%, right?

Of the world, whatever that number is, it's small.

Call it 2% for the purposes of our, about a little under 200 million people.

Wow.

Yeah.

At most, right now.

So if we look at Zimbabwe, Sudan, if we look at...

Small percentages of people.

Do you think the technology is mature enough?

Because it's not just about the idea, it's also about the implementation of it.

Like Bitcoin, for the most part, requires access to the internet.

Yeah.

And what do you think about accessibility of this technology now as a method of activism

in the worst parts of the world?

We often think like all the conversations we've had about Bitcoin is essentially middle

class, like wealthy people relative to the rest of the world.

They're kind of talking sort of investment and high concept ideas.

Then there's also the people in the world who are suffering, who are living through

hyperinflation.

They may not have a computer or access to the internet.

How do you think Bitcoin can help there?

Yeah.

So again, we have one clear use case, which is a sovereign savings account that you can

control, right?

The other use case is an unstoppable payments network.

This is very important for people who live behind, for example, sanctions, like the US

like basically weaponizes the dollar and like sanctions different countries.

And instead of sanctioning like a handful of rulers, for example, which I would support,

this is like a Magnitsky or smart sanctions.

Sometimes we'll just say, we're just going to shut off this whole country.

So the people suffer.

Cuba or Iran are good examples.

Average people suffer, right?

So people in those two countries I just mentioned, Cuba, Iran, or even Palestine, which is also

sort of like blockaded by the Israelis.

So you have Cuba, Iran, Palestine are three good examples where people inside all three

of those countries now are using Bitcoin to do commerce, do their business, send money

back and forth.

So sanctions resistant.

Sanctions resistant.

It does not get stopped by sanctions, right?

And also it's, again, remittances are extortionate.

I mean, the average remittance, you know, costs has a high fee, takes several days.

If your family is in Ghana or something like that, or Nigeria, and you live in the United

States, it can take time to use Western Union.

Sometimes it gets paused, it gets lost, there's issues, you have to deal with customer service.

Screw that.

I mean, you know, if the person has a cell phone, which increasingly is the case, I mean,

by the end of next year, more than five or six billion people depending on different

estimates will have smartphones basically by the end of 2022.

We're talking like the vast majority of humans will have access to smartphones.

They can all have sovereign Bitcoin wallets.

And there's even ways to access Bitcoin without the internet.

But I mean, we can get into that.

There's like hardware wallets and so on.

What do you mean by sovereign Bitcoin wallet?

You know, most users today are using Bitcoin in a custodial manner.

So this is kind of like having a bank account where you have a deposit account at a bank,

right?

So you have a claim, right?

You go to the bank and they have some of your money and you take it out, right?

With an ATM.

So what I would call noncustodial Bitcoin use would be similar to withdrawing cash from

an ATM.

You have it.

It's a bearer instrument.

OK, so when I...

Bearer instrument.

That's what it's called.

It's a bearer instrument.

I know.

I apologize.

I'm outside this community.

I'm in a bar of gold or a banknote or Bitcoin that you control, meaning you have the seed

phrase, right?

Which for the listeners essentially is 12 to 24 English words that you write down on

a piece of paper.

That's your like password to get into your Bitcoin account.

And that gives you that bearer instrument quality, right?

But unfortunately, most users still use Bitcoin in a custodial way, meaning they buy it on

Coinbase or Square or something like that.

You would put into the custodial into the custodial category like a bank.

And look, the good news is you can withdraw to your own control.

And in the Bitcoin community, we try to teach this idea that it's not your keys, not your

coins in the same way that if you deposit your money at the bank, you might not get

it back.

I mean, it's low likelihood, but it's very possible.

Same thing in Bitcoin.

Like if you want to get the full experience, you want to actually custody your own Bitcoin.

You want to put it whether it's on an open source software wallet, like the blue wallet

is a good one for people to check out or a hardware wallet like cold card, for example.

There's different ways to do this.

But essentially, like around the world, people are innovating.

Like don't think so low of your fellow man.

You know what I mean?

Like people are able to figure this out.

You know, I get a lot of flak from people saying, oh, Bitcoin is so hard to use.

I read this article in the New York Times saying this guy in Silicon Valley lost all

of his Bitcoin.

That's because he was a moron and didn't care about it.

This guy lost all this Bitcoin because it wasn't worth much 10 years ago and he, you

know, he forgot the password.

But if you're like receiving your remittance from a family member, you're going to lose

the password.

Right.

And you trust in the basic intelligence of people to figure this out and to innovate

and so on and figure out.

We're watching it, man.

Yeah.

You know, I'm, it's kind of funny that, but people in the United States are not very savvy

with money.

It's exactly the way you're describing is like when you have very little money, you're

going to be savvy with money.

You're going to understand exactly the mechanisms that work, that are resistant to the corruption

that's around you.

I mean, I remember sort of growing up in the Soviet Union, the general bureaucracy and

the corruption of everything around you, you figure out ways around that.

You figure out ways how to function within that kind of system to survive under inflation,

under hyperinflation, under all like basically being unable to trust any kind of, even the

police force and all those kinds of things.

You figure it out and that same way, perhaps Bitcoin could be all the different ways to

store and gain Bitcoin.

These mechanisms could be something that's figured out in the third world as opposed

to in the United States.

Oh, I mean, I would say the capital of Bitcoin could easily be Lagos and not San Francisco

in terms of users, in terms of people using it.

And again, the two use cases as a savings account and as an unstoppable payment rail.

These are the two ones that you should really think about, this is how people are using

it today.

Now, when it comes to, could it possibly be adopted by like a sufficient majority of the

population?

I say, yes.

And it's very similar to the way the mobile phone spread.

At the beginning, the cell phone was only for rich people, it was only for the elite,

it was huge, it didn't work very well, the interface sucked, it was clunky.

Over time, it got smaller and smaller and cheaper and cheaper and easier to use and

easier to use.

And today, everyone benefits.

So you're going to watch a similar technology upgrade process with Bitcoin.

Already in the last 10 years, Bitcoin has gotten so much easier to use.

I mean, there are now mobile wallets that are so slick.

There's one called Moon M U U N wallet from a team in Argentina.

And these guys created it because they saw their own currency devalued like three times

in the last 20 years.

And they've had a hell of a time trying to get their money back and forth in different

countries.

So they were like, let's make this easy for people.

Again, you know, this is the people's money.

This is something that cannot be controlled by governments or corporations.

And that makes it very powerful.

And I think it's actually quite exciting to be here in the adoption phase.

In the early days.

Yeah, man, this is the early days.

And you also mentioned that Bitcoin is the mechanism of a peaceful revolution.

So it's a way to resist authoritarianism in a peaceful way.

It's ultimately, you know, you mentioned sort of politics, information, and money.

It seems like in the space of money, this is one of the peaceful mechanisms.

It's a way to opt out.

You can opt out peacefully from the system.

And yeah, it's beautiful, it's beautiful.

So Bitcoin is currently by far the most popular sort of dominant cryptocurrency.

That said, and I look forward to your letters, Bitcoin maximalists.

That said, you know, Internet Explorer was the most popular browser for quite a long

time.

And then other browsers came along that out competed it like Chrome, Firefox, People's

Checkout Brave.

It's a great browser.

I think it's my favorite browser at this point.

Anyway, so why Bitcoin?

Why not another cryptocurrency?

If you look in the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years, do you think it's possible for another cryptocurrency

like Ethereum or something that it's not even here yet to overtake Bitcoin as a mechanism?

When you say overtake, what do you mean?

What do you mean overtake?

You mean number of users?

Do you mean a price per coin?

Yeah, the number of users, because we're talking about 1%, 2%.

And if we are serious about this being in the space of money as a way to give individuals

power, fight the centralized powers that use the money system and so on, how do we get

from 2% to 50%, right, to 60%, to 80%?

At that jump, is it obvious to you, not obvious, but do you think Bitcoin is the way to get

from 2% to 50% or are there going to be other cryptocurrencies that may emerge that get

us to 50%?

No.

I mean, Bitcoin is the innovation.

The innovation is in having the decentralized mint.

No one can change the monetary policy.

Everything else is downstream from there.

In Bitcoin, the mean would be 21 million.

There's never going to be any more than 21 million.

Every other cryptocurrency either has an inflationary policy, meaning there's going to continue

to be more and more of it over time, or its monetary policy can be changed by a small

group of people.

This is vividly on display in Ethereum, which is like the second largest and second most

robust cryptocurrency, right?

I've talked to senior Ethereum engineers over the last couple of weeks trying to figure

out what is the monetary policy of Ethereum?

No one can tell me.

No one knows how much ETH is going to be minted in 2022 and 2023 after they shift to proof

of stake.

I've seen estimates that range from 100,000 to 2 million.

So at the end of the day, you're going to be trusting a small group of people to make

those decisions.

That is what we are escaping with Bitcoin.

So all these other cryptocurrencies, they might have their use cases, virtually all

of them are not.

It's very important for people to know that if you take like the 4,500 cryptocurrencies

on CoinMarketCap, almost all of them are scams straight up.

Even the ones that have like noble intentions, I just don't think are going to add that much

value ultimately.

I think Bitcoin to me is the innovation and you know, that's because it has a monetary

policy and an issuance schedule that cannot be changed.

And that's what gets me so excited about it.

I mean, that's why it's such an important tool for human rights.

Yeah, it's interesting because when you grow from 2%, when you grow in the number of people

using it at the scale, they're using it, it's going to need to be resistant to governments

and institutions messing with it.

So it's interesting to see what kind of cryptocurrency would be resistant to that.

Obviously Dogecoin is going to win.

Let's be honest.

Well, I mean, look, the number two cryptocurrency in the world, probably by like how useful

it is to people is Tether, which is totally centralized, has blacklists.

So I'm not saying there won't be like new digital assets that are lumped into this category

that have usage, but they're not, they're not, it's not the same innovation as Bitcoin.

It's just sort of building on this idea of like a Euro dollar, maybe like a dollar that

is minted outside of the control of the US Federal Reserve, right?

It would be a Euro dollar.

So stable coins are kind of like Euro dollars just minted by private actors in a way, right?

But they're still tied to the dollar.

They're pegged to the dollar.

They're not escaping the system.

Escaping the system is Bitcoin.

We aren't reliant on the dollar.

We have our own, you know, full store value, medium of exchange, unit of account eventually.

And you know, the Bitcoin world will be denominated in different terms.

And I think everyone, everything else will be tied to it.

I really do.

It does feel currently like Bitcoin is like, like pirates or something like that.

And there's still like the central banks that are like the main navies of the, of the different

nations.

Yeah.

It's just this, if you talk about scale.

So there's going to be a moment if Bitcoin continues to grow in its impact, when governments

are going to seriously contend with, you know, what do we do with this?

Do you think about those moments?

Is Bitcoin, is the cryptocurrency world in general going to be able to withstand the

serious legal pushback from countries, from nations, especially authoritarian nations?

Yeah.

It's been interesting.

It's been 12 years, okay?

More than 12 years since Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin and they haven't been able

to stop it.

They have tried.

They have tried a lot.

I wrote a long essay for Quillette on this, like, like why haven't governments been able

to stop Bitcoin?

And my thesis is essentially that there's been like this mix of different kinds of technical,

social and economic and political incentives and disincentives that make it very difficult.

And I think to me, the best way to think about it is that Bitcoin is like a Trojan horse.

So just to actually tell that story just a little bit, because I think it's important

to understand the classical mythology tale, I find this very interesting.

Of the actual Trojan horse?

Of the actual Trojan horse.

Yeah.

Which was told in the Aeneid actually by Virgil, right?

And the idea was the Greeks had been like trying to take the city of Troy for like a

decade at these like impregnable walls and they couldn't do it.

And Ulysses and the rest of the Greek army were like, we don't know what to do.

So Minerva, the god of strategy and war, you know, kind of like they get this idea from

her, I guess, to actually try to use subterfuge and trickery to take over the city.

So the idea is to, and this was sort of hatched by Ulysses, right?

To put this horse together that would kind of be like a gift.

So the idea was the Greeks just like pretended to leave, right?

They deserted.

They left behind one soldier and this horse and the Trojans looked at it and they were

like, what's going on here?

And they brought in the soldier and the soldier's like, look, they left.

They're so sorry for all of the desecration and blood spill.

This is their gift to you.

It's, you know, honoring Minerva, you know, it's like this like, you know, trophy for

you guys.

And there were actually people inside Troy, Cassandra, a prophet, as well as Laocoon,

who was like a priest who said, no, no, no, this is obviously a trick.

This is obviously a trick.

But they were like dispatched and ignored because the horse was like, it was just like

so bad ass.

So the Trojans were like, I'm bringing it in the city.

So they brought it in themselves.

No blood spilled at all.

Right.

In the middle of the night, of course, what you realize is the horse was packed with Greek

soldiers and they come out and they let the army in, which was like hiding behind an island.

So this idea that like something could be so attractive that you really can't say no,

even if you know what's inside of it, is at play in Bitcoin.

So like in Bitcoin has this number go up technology, right?

It is what we call it in sort of shorthand NGO, NGU, right?

But what people don't realize is that NGU is like the Trojan horse.

Inside the Trojan horse is FGU, Freedom Go Up technology.

So dictators and rogue regimes and corporations are going to buy, mine, tax, accumulate this

thing because it's the best performing financial asset in the world.

What they don't realize or they're going to have to ignore is that they're also aiding

and abetting this freedom technology, which allows individuals to be sovereign and eventually

erodes their power.

There's no question that rogue regimes and bad actors have already used and will continue

to use Bitcoin.

The thing is when you think about a North Korea or a Venezuela and that government instructs

some of its bureaucrats and cronies and officials to start stealing Bitcoin or accumulating

it or whatever for short term gain to get around sanctions and use it to buy dollars

or something like that, right?

Which they can't get normally.

Well, guess what?

All those people who the regime has instructed to like figure this thing out and use it,

they're all going to realize, oh my God, this is money the government doesn't control.

And it's going to spread like a virus.

Okay?

So this is like the idea of the Trojan horse allegory, why I think it's so important and

powerful with Bitcoin.

All the people talking about Bitcoin today on TV, they don't care about freedom and privacy.

They just care about number go up.

But what they don't realize is what's concealed within.

And that's very, very powerful to me.

So the people talking about Bitcoin on TV are maybe investor types.

Yeah, professional investors, corporations and soon governments.

I mean, you just had today this morning on CNBC, the leader of the Republican leader

of the House of Representatives, a congressman saying, like, we need to be pro Bitcoin as

a country.

And the other day, Peter Thiel had a very interesting comment where he was basically

like, let's not fall behind China in this race.

So you have influential people in our government, like sort of posturing for this, like, you

know, Bitcoin race that's going to happen in the next 10 years.

You're going to see this.

You're going to compete to stack Bitcoin.

Absolutely.

So you believe the the thing that's shiny and sexy, like the Trojan horse, the number

go up.

It's too hard to ignore.

And for it to do to define that a little further as meaning it does seem like the more people

get excited and start using Bitcoin, the more its value grows.

So it's just a good feedback loop.

Yeah, it's a feedback loop.

And then the reason you're excited about it, especially is that F.G.

Freedom go up.

Freedom go up, which is it ultimately gives power to the individuals to so decentralize

the entire system.

Yeah, I mean, like when Tesla stacks Bitcoin, they're just doing that as self interest.

They think it's going to be a good inflation hedge.

Fine.

But what they maybe don't care about, don't realize or they don't need to care.

I mean, Bitcoin's power is it like co ops people into promoting a freedom tool, even

if they don't care about or even if they hate freedom, doesn't matter.

So when Tesla stacks Bitcoin and the price goes up and more interest goes up and more

people around the world are like, wow, Bitcoin, then more people get involved again.

More adoption, more price, more developers, better user interface, more privacy tools,

more mining, more network security.

It's just this like positive feedback loop that continues to grow and it will grow intensely

in the next decade as we go through the adoption cycle.

And the reason why I'm so excited about this is the human rights world, again, to get back

to our previous conversation, is very hard to find people who have, you know, the empathy

or the altruism to actually make a difference abroad in places like China or Saudi Arabia

or North Korea.

People are very quick to just like, they'll just quickly toss off the pretty words that

they care about human rights as soon as profits come into play.

So there's no alignment of incentives, right?

The reason why Bitcoin is so powerful is that it aligns the incentives.

All of a sudden, they can be as greedy as they want.

They are being forced to promote a freedom tool.

This I've never seen before and it makes me, it gives me a lot of like excitement.

It's very refreshing because we've been laboring in the human rights space, you have to like

raise money and it's all like nonprofit work and you're like begging for people to make

a difference for you.

Here you have this like incredible asset which people will accumulate out of self preservation,

self interest and greed, and yet it will strengthen the power of the individual.

That is what we need to fight, big brother.

That's what we need to fight, like what I'm scared is happening in China, like this growing

authoritarian state which is powered by big data analysis.

This is our way to fight back and it runs on this like really interesting engine again

that like takes advantage of our base nature as humans and I know that it sounds terrible

for me to say this, but I mean, ultimately we are self interested and it is hard to get

people to care about others living a thousand miles away.

We are kind of localized in our empathy.

Being as someone who works to help people who live in like a hundred different countries,

it's very difficult to get Americans to care about what's happening in Belarus or in Kashmir.

It just is.

But guess what?

They're going to definitely care about Bitcoin because they want to see their net worth go

up, they want to do better for their family, et cetera.

They're going to get into this thing and it's really going to like make that powerful tool

for everyone else who's using it.

So this interplay dynamic is fascinating to me.

Yeah, I have to, I'm somebody who doesn't like the corrupting effects of greed, but

it is also human nature.

Yeah, I don't like it either, but we have to be realists.

You have to acknowledge it and then maybe use it for your advantage.

And it's not just Bitcoin itself.

Like exchanges today are adopting something called lightning network, which is a way to

scale Bitcoin on a second layer.

Much like we had gold bars, which we scaled with paper money and then we had visa credit

cards, which were a way of scaling the paper notes, Bitcoin scales through lightning network.

It's a private instant globally final settlement network.

It's something you all should check out.

It's very, very interesting.

The exchanges aren't adopting lightning for its privacy benefits.

Like lightning operates off the chain, meaning surveillance companies can't see, they can't

do chain analysis on lightning because it's on an onion routed second layer kind of that

works kind of like the Tor project.

The exchanges don't care about privacy.

They're doing it because it reduces fees.

Lightning is cheaper and faster.

So again, we have this really interesting alignment of incentives where like the freedom

tech is being promoted by people who don't, I don't, it doesn't matter what their incentives

are.

I could care less if they were altruistic or not.

And I think this is, and you're going to maybe see this even in the future.

There's more things coming in Bitcoin down the pike.

Lightning was enabled by an upgrade called Segwit, right?

Which took place a few years ago, which was the culmination of the block size conflict.

There's another thing coming up called cross input signature aggregation, which may, if

it takes effect in the next few years, it may compel exchanges to collaboratively spend

all their Bitcoin together in a way that really protects our privacy and fights surveillance.

But they're not going to do it for moral reasons.

They're going to do it because it's going to save them money and improve their bottom

line.

Can you speak to that kind of collaborative so that you can have multiple parties in a

single transaction kind of thing?

Yeah.

Like you could do that today.

Absolutely.

It's called the CoinJoin, for example.

But right now it's more expensive to CoinJoin in Bitcoin.

You have to pay a premium for your privacy.

This would flip that on its head and would basically say, if you have one transaction,

hey, pile them all in, have as many parties as you want.

The more parties you get in, the cheaper it's going to be per party.

And that's not possible in Bitcoin today, but it might be in the future.

But again, the beauty in Bitcoin are these ways that it just aligns human incentives

and it aligns our most base desires and needs and realities with freedom and privacy.

That I've never seen before.

And that's why I think it's so interesting.

So somebody like Eric Weinstein actually spoke to this, the idea of blockchain in general.

From a 10,000 foot view, the blockchain is a centralized place to keep the record of

everything that ever happened and does that concern you from a privacy perspective, from

a control perspective, even though it's managed, especially given the low frequency of transaction

for Bitcoin, you can have a lot of small computers across the globe contain the entirety set

of transactions, all of those kinds of features.

Does that concern you that there's one place where everything is made public in terms of

everything that ever happened?

No.

And I'll give you two reasons.

Number one, the Bitcoin blockchain is ultimately a settlement layer.

It's kind of like something like Fedwire in the United States.

It's a way for like institutions to settle with each other.

That's what I think it's going to be like in 20, 30 years from now.

The average person is never going to touch the Bitcoin blockchain probably.

They're going to use things like lightning or unfortunately, they may use Bitcoin banks,

but they'll either use custodians or they'll use second layer noncustodial solutions to

interact.

The main chain is going to get very expensive.

It's going to be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars or even more if the dollar

starts to weaken to make a transaction on the main chain.

And that will be reserved for like very large transactions or transactions that need final

final settlement, et cetera, et cetera.

And I think that that's fine and that's okay.

And it's very important that that ledger, that settlement layer be kept by thousands

of people around the world.

The Bitcoin blockchain is not centralized.

It is decentralized.

It is run by people like me who run a node at home.

I run a personal server.

I run the Bitcoin blockchain, no one else.

You run it.

That person runs it.

There's no one in charge.

Well, you have a full node?

Yeah.

I run a full node.

It's great.

That's great, man.

You run it and that way you can be sovereign over all of your usage, right?

And you can run it on a Raspberry Pi with less than 150 bucks of equipment.

And that's so important because again, there is no Amazon web service vulnerability here.

That is a problem.

And I agree with you.

We're trending in a bad direction.

We're like, the government could just turn off a big important website or a news source.

Well, they can't turn off Bitcoin because it doesn't live on AWS, it lives with us.

We are Bitcoin.

And I think that that's very, very powerful.

And then you can have something like a lightning network where you can escape some of the constraints

of the blockchain, depending on your needs of the privacy and all those kinds of things.

Everything's an engineering trade off, but yeah, you can trade off some of the assurances

of the base layer to go into lightning, for example, and there you can get more speed

and more privacy.

And the things that Bitcoin lacks, speed and privacy, for example, you can get on these

second layers.

So there's all kinds of cool engineering things that people are coming up with.

But I also want to say anyone who says the blockchain, like that's a red flag for that

person doesn't really know what they're talking about.

Like Satoshi didn't use the blockchain in the white paper.

Blockchain was a marketing term that people came up with later to try and do this thing

that was kind of like it peaked in 2015 and it continues to be an issue today of it's

blockchain not Bitcoin.

And that was like a very corporate kind of social attack on Bitcoin to say we could take

this ledger part of this radical thing that's for criminals and all these bad people, but

we could take one part of it out and we could bring it over here and we could make it safe

for everybody.

The real McCoy's Bitcoin, I mean, Satoshi referred to it as the time chain.

I mean, really what they're talking about is just these blocks that are connected chronologically

of transactions.

It's really not that exciting.

The exciting part of Bitcoin is the proof of work where the transaction processing is

done by mining and by energy and by real world expenditures instead of like, you know, some

central ledger.

And you know, when you remove the blockchain from Bitcoin, it's not very, to me, it's just

not that interesting.

I don't know, to me, blockchain or time chain, whatever, as it philosophically is a pretty

beautiful idea.

I mean, it's pretty simple, but it's nevertheless as beautiful from a big database person.

It's an interesting way to store information that, especially that's totally publicly accessible.

It's I know that to Bitcoin proof of work is the fundamental idea, but to cryptocurrency

and digital money in general and to money, the blockchain is a really interesting idea

to me.

The way I think about it is it's kind of, you know, physics.

And I like that there's a place that you can rely on that's very difficult to mess with.

What it's not though, like it's outside of maybe Ethereum.

Every other blockchain is easy to mess with.

So you're saying that proof of work is what makes it hard to mess with.

Absolutely.

Proof of work is the key.

Right.

And Ethereum is about to leave proof of work.

So it's about to go to proof of stake, which is literally the existing system where a small

group of people get to decide the monetary policy.

Yeah.

Reputation has a lot of value there and that you could be, it could be manipulated.

I may sound brutal, but I'm coming at it from a political science perspective.

For me, it's all about freedom versus dictatorship.

And that's why I find it so compelling that regardless of how much power or might or how

many armies you have, you can't change the rules of Bitcoin.

If you're wrong about Bitcoin, what would that look like?

What kind of thing that in 10, 20 years that you, you're not wrong.

Right.

It doesn't pan out.

It doesn't pan out, but other things that actually make you feel good about all the

hard work you've done do pan out, something you haven't expected.

What might that be?

Well, as we've talked about, my career started in human rights and in promoting individual

freedom and fighting authoritarianism.

That fight will continue on no matter what happens with Bitcoin.

I think it would be a massive failure and a tragedy if this project like didn't work.

The Bitcoin project.

Yes.

If the Bitcoin project didn't work, we would, it would, honestly, it's one of the only

things that gives me hope because it is an effective way to push back against the creeping

centralized control.

If for whatever reason, and I can't really see, one of the reasons I'm so into it is

I can't really see how it's not going to work.

Again, I think the Trojan horse allegory is too powerful.

These big centralized actors are going to be too greedy and they're going to want some

as opposed to banning it.

It's way easier for them to buy it than to ban it.

I think that's just what's going to happen.

But if, but if whatever, for whatever reason it failed, I would have very little hope left

because really, I mean, the Chinese model of like centralizing all of your data and

controlling it, I mean, ultimately is, is a very, very powerful sort of like arch force.

And I would be concerned that that would be all of our, of our sort of destiny.

I do have to sort of push back at a style of communication and you, you're not doing

it today.

You're doing, you're being exceptionally eloquent and arguing these ideas.

But me, especially just from studying history and being very skeptical from growing up in

the Soviet Union, I'm very skeptical and cautious when I see a community of people being very

sure of an idea.

Doesn't matter what that idea is.

And there's a huge amount of certainty around Bitcoin.

Part of it is an important feature because you, it's number go up.

So far.

Number go up is a really important part of the mechanism to make sure that it, it grows

in impact, network effects, because I mean, it's really important to get excited about

idea for take hold, that's the way human nature works and so on.

But I also get, even something that you mentioned that, you know, others may not, you know,

if you mentioned blockchain, you're sensitive to the attacks that have been, that have been

mounted or the word blockchain have been used.

People have been fooled.

I mean, like people in the humanitarian sector have been fooled into thinking that some centralized

blockchain project is going to help some refugee all collapsed.

There's a huge, it makes me sad that there's a huge number of scams.

Like you know what makes me really sad and just a tiny little tangent.

There's been recently, I guess with the growing platform or something, there's been a bunch

of fake Lex Friedman accounts.

Yeah.

And have a million, but not only do they do stupid stuff, but they've been messaging people

like on LinkedIn and people write to me and they're saying like, I think it gets people.

I think they click on stuff.

I think they were not sure.

And it makes me think like, people are gullible or not gullible, but like, they're just like

I am, which is they're like hopeful about the world.

They're optimistic about the world, naive about the evil that's out there.

This is what goes wrong with Bitcoin.

And I've seen it.

People fall for these like, I mean, like in these different countries, I'm trying to like

talk to different people about Bitcoin and like the amount of like MLM schemes, pyramid

schemes, Ponzi schemes, there are just so many of them.

And there's plenty here too.

But like in Zimbabwe, I was talking to this guy who is a reporter who studies the effects

like the foreign currency exchange markets.

He's just saying one of the main reasons people don't want to get into Bitcoin is because

they've been scammed so hard by all these other things.

So I would say that that's one way it could go wrong is that like people just continue

to be like afraid of it because of things that are like that in the past.

So that not, it's not just the volatility, it's just the, you know, yeah, having like

If you think it's a pyramid scheme, you're not going to want to get involved.

And in some sense, if I were to speak to the Bitcoin Maximus community is to maybe ease

up on the certainty because that gives me the signal that it's a scam, to be honest.

So whenever somebody, whenever there's a lot of people being cultishly excited about something,

I start being very skeptical.

It's like, you know, I used to like Green Day before they became really popular.

And then the moment they became really popular, I'm like, I don't know, he started wearing

mascara and I was like, I don't like him anymore.

So I'm very skeptical about evangelists of an idea because I think Bitcoin on its own

is just a powerful idea that stands.

But I also understand that in a world of a lot of competing ideas where there's a lot

of scams and a lot of money to be made through those scams that you have to be, that you

have to be innovative in the kind of mechanisms you use to break through the scam, the ocean

of scams.

I took this personality test and I'm a 99 skepticism.

So I was first, sadly, cause I was first introduced to Bitcoin in 2013 and I was like, ah, whatever.

And it took me four years to actually get into it, to go down the rabbit hole.

I didn't really start to grasp it and start getting excited about it until 2017.

So I was regrettably very, very skeptical for a long time.

And I just thought it was like, whatever.

So I appreciate that.

And you should be skeptical.

But ultimately you got to believe in things like I believe in democracy, I believe it's

good for people.

I believe it's better than tyranny.

I believe in the internet.

I know that we've had issues with centralization of the internet, but I still believe it's

better to be connected than to have bridges between us.

And I believe in Bitcoin.

And to me, it's like a very similar progressive force that we're encountering.

But yeah, be skeptical, nothing will befall you.

That's bad if you're like cautious and skeptical.

That's like a good mentality to have.

One thing we haven't talked about all the violations of the human rights that authoritarian

regimes do.

There's a, not a positive, but there is a, you mentioned that nationalism is a drug.

There's something beautiful about loving your country, having pride in your country, loving

the, there's a feeling of belonging.

It could be country, it could be tribe, it could be family.

That's really powerful.

And that speaks to human nature as well.

And that can sometimes overpower everything else.

Patriotism, and you know, sometimes it can be seen when you study history, when you look

at Stalinist, the Soviet Union, or you can even look at Hitler and Nazi Germany, we tend

to paint patriotism in a negative light.

And then maybe when we look at the United States, but even here in the United States,

people often paint patriotism in a bad light, you know, every time I say I love America,

also as an immigrant, I love this country.

It's funny how that's taken as a political statement that, you know, people, I guess

on the right has been, have been more active in saying that they love the country and people

on the left have not sort of, it's almost become a weird slogan as opposed to a statement

of just love.

And I understand that patriotism can be a slippery slope into letting your government,

I mean, it's exactly what you're saying, the value of freedom of speech is you hold your

government to account for all the ways they mess up.

I mean, look, you have patriotism and then you have jingoism, right?

It's very important that we stay on the patriotic side.

Like as an American, I'm very patriotic in terms of, I love the values that this country

was founded on if you read the Bill of Rights.

And I love the fact that it was just flexible enough that we were able to change it to grant,

or at least to try to grant all people the same rights.

It was not the original plan of the founders, right?

It had to be changed.

But since then we've remained, those laws have remained and they're very good.

And I'm very proud of that.

What I'm not proud of is the jingoistic part of our country where we invade other countries

and bomb other countries.

I'm not proud of our prison system.

I think it's a huge stain on our nation.

I'm not proud of a lot of things.

So I think you can be patriotic, but you can be critical of your country.

And that's important, I feel like the jingoistic thing is the thing that we need to watch out

for.

That's just my own personal take.

Out of all the projects that the Human Rights Foundation works on, what's the most important

one to you right now?

Like what that's been occupying your mind?

Yeah, I just read again this New Yorker piece that just came out that you should read.

It's called Ghost Walls.

And it's the story of how the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide right now, just

like other regimes did and the Turks did to the Armenians and the Nazis did to the Jews.

And it's happening again right now.

We said never again, and you know, that's just not true.

We're letting it happen.

And again, with the business stuff, like Airbnb is like a sponsor of the Olympics, like what?

At the individual level, at a business level, how does somebody like me, who's just one

little ant, how does somebody like Elon Musk, who is in charge of 10,000 ants, fight it?

How do we push back?

A great blueprint is the fight against the South African apartheid.

So we did a few events down in Johannesburg, and I've had the pleasure of being able to

go to the apartheid museum several times.

And it really does a good job of chronicling how they were able to do it.

It took a while, there's no doubt, but the way it was done was good.

Peaceful action from abroad was very important.

So there was like the Sullivan principles.

So like you can peacefully protest as a company, particular regimes, and it's very effective.

And not just corporations, but like the Olympics is a great example.

Like Chinese government should not be able to host the Olympics.

The IOC should say no, not until you close down those prison camps.

This is a perfect, peaceful way to push back.

No one gets hurt.

Same thing when we had the Korean Olympics a few years ago, North Korea should not have

been allowed any sort of symbolistic kind of hosting rights there.

They have prison camps, gulags that we can see from outer space very clearly.

And their regime is the cruelest one on the planet probably.

Why were they able to sit and cheer and get to sort of cohost the Olympics?

This is spineless.

Like the IOC, the Olympics, and major corporations should stand up, especially in the cultural

sector where you don't lose anything, or you shouldn't have to lose anything.

So I think if we look at the way that we forced the apartheid regime out, this international

solidarity of musicians, athletes, performers, celebrities is very, very powerful.

Unfortunately, today's celebrities are doing the opposite.

We just had this press release go out yesterday about ACON, and he's off whitewashing the

crimes of the dictator of Uganda and trying to build a future city there with him.

If this was the 1980s, ACON would be raising his fist and saying, we need to fight the

apartheid regime.

How do we get back to that?

We need to think about that.

We have to figure out how to harness celebrities, influencers, and companies and get them to

actually stand up for something for once.

I mean, that's something we've lost.

We've really had a spine against that, and we've lost it.

And you lose things.

You lose them forever.

Look at Tibet.

Tibet was a big cause for people in the 90s.

You used to go to colleges and kids would have the Tibetan flags all over the dorm rooms.

Go ahead, we'd have Tibet on the stage, and everybody wanted to, you know, free Tibet

was a big thing.

Well, guess what?

Like, we lost it for some reason.

It's not a thing anymore, and Tibet has been totally colonized, you know?

So I think it's important that we find a way to unlock an interest in the celebrity classes

among athletes, singers, presidents.

You know, we need to find a way to punish these people.

Yeah, it's surprising because we've become more and more connected so we can communicate

more effectively at a large scale, and yet we seem to be worse and worse at real activism.

It seems like the outrage that's overtaken the communication channels has been very US

focused and often more about outrage and less about productive activism.

I'm very jaded.

I mean, it's very difficult to do these things at scale effectively.

I do not believe we will be successful in boycotting the Chinese Olympics.

We weren't in 2008.

I don't think, and they're much more evil now, and I don't think we're going to be able

to do it this time.

And again, to go back to the Bitcoin piece, that's why I'm like very interested in this

thing because it doesn't require my altruism.

It doesn't require some famous singer or some corporation to sacrifice anything.

They're literally just going to follow their own profits, seeking self interested motives,

and they're going to end up making a stronger human rights tool for other people.

Freedom go up.

FGU, man.

Do you think we're, it's kind of a dark question, but do you think we're headed towards a war

with China, the United States versus China?

I hope not.

I hope not.

In the cyberspace and potentially even a hot war.

I think there's too many people with too much money to be lost to go to a hot war on both

sides, but eventually we're just going to, someone's going to have to stand up.

I mean, the subjugation of Hong Kong and the genocide of the Uyghurs and the colonization

of Tibet.

I mean, Taiwan is the next big thing.

I mean, Xi Jinping has made it very clear, you know, Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan.

So we're going to have to stand up for Taiwan for different reasons, both for moral reasons,

but also for semiconductor reasons.

We need TSMC to be on our side, not have China take over TSMC.

So there's different reasons why we're going to have to protect Taiwan.

And you just hope it's not a hot war.

I mean, at this point, well, but also from inside the governments of China and Russia

as well, but China I guess is the powerhouse here, is how do these governments get reformed?

Is there a hope for them to become democracies, like true democracies, representative democracies

and sort of reform them to be ethical players on the world stage?

No empire lasts forever.

And it's impossible to predict when these regimes fall.

I mean, no one thought the Soviet Union was going to fall when it fell.

Like that, like if you study like the news and the scholarship of the era, no one knew

that the Tunisian government was going to fall after Mohammed Bouazizi lit himself on

fire.

No one predicted that that would become what we now know as the Arab Spring, right?

These things are impossible to predict.

And one day the Chinese regime will fall.

I just, we don't know when.

Yes.

You know, but, and there's quite a few folks who talk about the fall of the American empire.

And it also concerns me that we don't know when that might fall.

You assume me as a very excited, naive American, I'm very excited by this project that I think

is the beacon of hope in the world still, but that's probably how you feel before it's

the end.

Yeah, the party, you want to leave the party before it starts to deteriorate.

I think America could continue to have like a major, major leadership role for a long,

long time.

I think certain things we do will become maybe no longer possible in terms of the way we

intimidate people on the world stage and especially the way we use our currency as a weapon.

I think that that's going to decline over time as we become more of a multipolar world.

But I do still believe in America and the values that were founded on despite all the

warts.

I believe in us and I would prefer us absolutely to be the most prominent of the multipolar

world vis a vis a regime like Russia or China.

Absolutely.

There's no question.

So we've been talking about states and nations, but can we just briefly talk about Facebook

and Twitter and companies that have a huge impact on the world as well.

And actually one of the things that make America a great nation is it is the place from which

these great companies have sprung up.

Is there, from a human rights perspective, is there something that bothers you about

Facebook about these large companies?

Is there something we need to fix?

Something we need to be upset about, fight back on, reform, do some sort of real activism

about?

I'm very concerned about social media platforms and companies.

It almost feels like we're losing the golden age of the internet.

You know, we could like go online and interact with each other and share and not be worried

about censorship.

It feels like that was a golden age, like in the late nineties, the two thousands, and

now everything is becoming very politicized.

And I'm not sure that there's a solution.

Like I don't think there's a button we can press to fix it.

I'm kind of afraid that this is sort of just what happens when societies digitize.

Like I think that certain opinions just become demonized in the room and then the social

room that we have on the internet.

And I don't know if there's a magical solution there.

I do know that there's technological solutions that will allow us to continue to communicate

and for creators to reach their audiences without censorship.

And that's very exciting.

Like right now you could be deplatformed from your, you know, from like whether it's Patreon

or YouTube or whatever, and your bank account can be closed down, right?

There are emerging ways that Adam Curry, like the Podfather and a bunch of other people

are experimenting with, where you can essentially have your audio podcast across a whole bunch

of different, you know, platforms.

So you know, it's censorship resistant, and then your audience can pay you over lightning

in streaming money.

Like they can stream you money as they listen.

So you're removing the whole advertising piece.

You don't need to do advertising anymore.

You have this direct relationship with your audience.

And this is possible with something like lightning where you can do streaming money that's censorship

resistant.

And a lot of the people who are building a lightning network, for example, Elizabeth

Stark who, you know, started Lightning Labs and has done within her company that people

that work with her have built a huge part of the lightning infrastructure, you know,

what animates her is this idea of like, again, artists and creators being able to have that

direct ability to reach out and have that peer to peer relationship with their audience.

And I'm excited for that.

And I do think that's coming, but I am very worried that the golden age of like centralized

social media platforms is kind of behind us.

And I'm not sure how to fix that.

I don't know if that's like a fixable problem.

Interesting.

I have a hope that it's a fixable problem.

I think it's fixable because there's demand for it to be fixed.

That's the way I think about it.

Well, is Twitter that bad right now?

Like, I mean, it's fixable in as much as you can do a verification.

So you can give a blue check to someone and then that person is like more credible and

they go to the top of the comments and there's like tweaks you can do.

You can continue to improve it, but it's not going to fix the fact that like Twitter can

decide to kick off the president.